Color Psychology: How to Create Your Perfect Color Palette

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Color psychology is a well known but little-studied area of brain science. Yet even though it is less explored, we do know that color has a significant impact on how we perceive brands, and the world around us.

Color Psychology

Color psychology can make the difference between creating a brand that invokes excitement or dependability or joy and happiness. Green is naturally a very earthy tone. Blue is dependable and authentic. Red is energetic and passionate. Purple is royal and wealthy. Each of these colors brings certain thoughts and emotions to mind.

For more on color psychology check out these articles:

Website Color Palette

Deciding on a color palette is important as it defines your brand along with your logo. These are a few options to inspire some thought on colors. Knowing some color theory can help create the perfect palette for your brand, which at the same time evokes the emotions you want to draw out in your customers and readers.

Before just choosing your favorite color (totally what I did!), think about the mission and purpose of your brand and business. Techie Mamma’s colors include some teal, red, orange, yellow, and purple. This was a combination of some favorite colors (red) and some more subdued colors to also inspire some authenticity, calmness, happiness, and luxuriousness.

Color Palette Creators

Color is my daylong obsession, joy, and torment. -Claude Monet — Color evoking emotions of obsession, joy, and torment.

Once you have an idea of what colors you want to use to get the absolutely perfect shades that go well with the others you will want to come up with a whole brand scheme. There is a specific sweet spot of how many colors just like in fonts you usually don’t want to use more than 3 different fonts. We see this play out in primary colors, secondary colors, and tertiary colors.

In building your palette think about each type of content on your website. What color will you use for the main text, headlines, captions, background, menu bar? Make sure all these colors compliment each other and if you are adding one color on top of another ensure there is enough color contrast for color blindness and older eyes.

Think about:

What color will you use for your headlines and logo?
Can you pick complimentary colors that work with your main colors?
White space on websites is also important, think about which part of your website should you use color?

Some more reading to create some fabulous color schemes:

There are many color palette generators on the web. Have a favorite photo that has all your colors? There is a generator that will extract those colors. Check out some of my favorite color scheme creators:

My favorite is most likely Coolors.co they just recently rebuilt their whole site and they have some great extensions for Adobe products and an iOS app as well. I have a quick tutorial on some of the features.

Putting it All Together – Color Scheme

With some knowledge about color psychology and the most common meanings and emotions, apply them to your brand! Some niches have common colors, like blue for health care. Don’t be afraid to change up the norm. Choose colors that represent what your brand is about or what you want your customers to feel when they shop at your store.

Can you tell me what my color is?! That’s right I love red! This article by one of my favorite marketers and authors Neil Patel talks about the psychology of color and how to use it for different audiences.

So what does your color scheme say about your brand, website and your personality? What are the colors that you use? If you want some help creating color schemes that flow together check out these tools.

Lastly, here are some more articles to get some inspiration flowing, if you want to learn more about color and the web:

Tell me in the comments what colors you will use for your color palette.

Cousett

Known as THE Techie Mamma, I am a boy(x2) mom, and love technology. As a former Educational Technology academic turned Mompreneur, and super passionate educator, I am on a mission to empower Mompreneurs to build, and grow their business to live the Mompreneur Life they want.